An insight into Bradley John Murdoch's mind - the killer of Peter Falconio

AS CORRECTIONS minister for the former Northern Territory Labor government, Gerry McCarthy had three encounters with killer Bradley John Murdoch.

Paul Toohey

News Corp Australia NetworkNovember 8, 20131:05pm

A brief look at Murdoch and Falconio0:50

Bradley John Murdoch was convicted for the murder of Peter Falconio in 2005, but the British tourist's body has never been found

April 10th 2013

6 years ago

/video/video.news.com.au/News/

AS CORRECTIONS minister for the former Northern Territory Labor government, Gerry McCarthy had three encounters with killer Bradley John Murdoch.

The first time, Mr McCarthy challenged Murdoch on the design of a trailer he was fabricating off his own plans in the industrial section of the Alice Springs prison.

“On my first trip to the industry section, I crashed straight in, and freaked out the officers a bit, and engaged him in a conversation,” says Mr McCarthy.

“He had a table with technical drawings and he was actually building an off-road trailer. And he had two prisoners, both Aboriginal, and they were working on the spring hangers while he was supervising.”

Murdoch, 54, convicted in 2005 for the 2001 roadside execution-style murder of British traveller Peter Falconio and assaulting his girlfriend, Joanne Lees, is serving a 28-year non-parole period in the Territory.

Murdoch has never admitted to the murder and rejected inducements that would have allowed him to shift to a WA prison to be closer to his family in return for revealing the location of Falconio’s body.

“He’s very big man, he towered over me,” says Mr McCarthy. “He has very setback, steely eyes. He gave me a story about how he grew up in the west and knows Aboriginal people.

“He had very archaic ideas about Aborigines, he reminded me of an old pastoralist.

FalconioSource:News Limited

“We were talking and chatting. I’d spent four years in the Nicholson River building outstations and I’d had a trailer which I broke four times. It was always the spring hangers that let me down.”

A spring hanger is a U-shaped piece of metal that attaches leaf springs to the axle and chassis to provide suspension so it is not a rigid, bouncing object.

Mr McCarthy told Murdoch the design for his rear spring hanger, which was welded to the chassis, was inflexible and vulnerable to rough roads.

“I said to Murdoch, ‘The format you’re creating for those spring hangers won’t work in the bush’,” says Mr McCarthy.

“He said to me, ‘Yes it will. That’s good gear. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

“I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ I’m looking up at this life-sentence prisoner, and he was quite challenged. Here was this upstart telling him I’d break his spring hangers if they were on my trailer.”

FalconioSource:News Limited

Murdoch is in a class of high-profile prisoner who cannot speak to the press, so his views of anything, from spring hangers to where Falconio lies buried, are beyond reach.

Mr McCarthy, one of a handful of Labor politicians who managed to keep his bush seat when the Country Liberals routed them in the August election, does not deny he was fascinated meeting a man with such a reputation.

“The second time I went back he had the technical drawings for a cherry picker on a trailer,” says Mr McCarthy.

“We had bought this cherry picker and it was out of action. He had the drawings for it on a table. They were quite complex hydraulics, and he was rebuilding the whole thing.

“So I engaged him again and got him to explain what he was doing. He was very switched on with his mechanics and engineering.”

Mr McCarthy has spent most of his life working with Aborigines and was curious as to how Murdoch was managing in a prison system that is overwhelmingly indigenous.

In 1995, Murdoch was convicted in WA for firing a rifle at group of Aborigines who were having a celebratory barbecue in the riverbed at Fitzroy Crossing after a grand final win. His arms are tattooed with racist insignia.

Gerry McCarthySource:Northern Territory News

“In terms of mixing with the general prison population, when I asked, he was quite reserved,” says Mr McCarthy.

“He had some special privileges where he could take drawings back to his cell, where he had pens and pencils and rulers. He did a lot of his drawing work in his cell. I got the impression he didn’t mix much outside the cell, that he was sort of above it, but I’m only guessing.”

On a third visit, Murdoch was fabricating the bushfire fighting trailers. These were dual axle which, says Mr McCarthy, eliminated the earlier problems with the spring hangers.

“These trailers were brilliant, and he was building them,” said Mr McCarthy.

Mr McCarthy tried to tell Murdoch the real money was in big industrial art pieces, to which Murdoch rolled his eyes. “He’s a nuts and bolts man,” says Mr McCarthy.

Murdoch was last year transferred back to Darwin’s Berrimah Prison, in order to “destabilise him”, prison-speak for preventing him from becoming too settled, and too powerful, in his environment.Murdoch had been earlier shifted from Berrimah to Alice for the same reason, because it was assessed he was becoming too familiar with guards and certain prisoners.

According to sources, Murdoch is now working in the kitchen at Berrimah, but Corrections would not confirm this.

“Like all prisoners, he would be offered the opportunity to work,” said a spokesman. “If they don’t work, they don’t get paid. I can’t give out any information on his case file.”

FalconioSource:News Limited

In recent years, there has been a consistently repeated claim that Murdoch was denied justice by being convicted on an obscure science called “low-copy DNA”.

While it is true that low-copy was allowed into evidence at his trial, in an attempt to establish that Murdoch's DNA was on the gearstick of Falconio’s Kombi, and on the inside of the handmade cuffs he used to restrain Lees, this was irrelevant at the trial.

Apart from the strong circumstantial evidence, Murdoch left a remarkably vivid DNA spot on the back of Joanne Lees’ t-shirt that was forensically examined in the normal, accepted DNA testing methodology.

This spot was found to be 150 quadrillion times more likely belong to Murdoch than another person selected at random from the Northern Territory population.